Technology
Normal telephone numbers (following the E.164 standard) may be of any length, and so when dialed from landline telephones, the network must apply heuristics to determine when dialing is complete — in the US, for example, dialed numbers are generally seven or ten digits long, sometimes requiring "1" to be prefixed (the trunk digit). On mobile phones, numbers are terminated with the "Send" or "Call" key and sent all at once over the network, so the network knows the end of the dialed number, and thus one can use short numbers without clashing with longer numbers.
For instance, on a land-line phone, one could not use the short code 12345, since then one could not dial the phone number 1-234-555-4626 (or any other number that shared the prefix 12345), but on a mobile phone there is no such ambiguity.
Read more about this topic: Short Code
Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“If we had a reliable way to label our toys good and bad, it would be easy to regulate technology wisely. But we can rarely see far enough ahead to know which road leads to damnation. Whoever concerns himself with big technology, either to push it forward or to stop it, is gambling in human lives.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
“Radio put technology into storytelling and made it sick. TV killed it. Then you were locked into somebody else’s sighting of that story. You no longer had the benefit of making that picture for yourself, using your imagination. Storytelling brings back that humanness that we have lost with TV. You talk to children and they don’t hear you. They are television addicts. Mamas bring them home from the hospital and drag them up in front of the set and the great stare-out begins.”
—Jackie Torrence (b. 1944)